Thinking back

This time last year I was pregnant. This time two years ago I was also pregnant. I am not pregnant now.

Last week as I waited in the yoga studio for my class to start the women from a prenatal class started filtering out. They were different shapes and sizes--different months of pregnancy. Small, round bellies. Some large bellies. I watched them go and it seemed I could see something expectant on their faces. Waiting for the lives within them to be borne. From my window seat, my kids all at home with the babysitter, I sat in solitude and thought about how badly I used to want to be pregnant. I ached for it. Now I can't even believe I ever was. I blinked and I became a mother, a woman who will never be pregnant again, watching other pregnant women and feeling myself apart from them.

Don't get me wrong--there is no desire in me anywhere at all to be pregnant. Most of the time when I see women with round, full bellies walking down the street I still think Thank God that is not me. It still hasn't even been a year since I carried babies inside me. I just. . .can't even believe I already did it. I have a hard time comprehending that the many years--two decades--of longing and hoping to be a mother are behind me. Not just wanting to be a mother but to be pregnant. To nurse. The whole shebang. It felt like a piece was missing inside me. And then it happened. And it happened again. I fell off the planet--away from my old life, away from myself pre-motherhood and I fell into a world where I am the center of a new universe. Not forever but for now. How do you even take it in?

We are approaching the month of birthdays. Many people in our family--my mother, my husband, his mother--all turn another year older in June. My four children share two birthdays in June. A tribe of Gemini. I remember my mom trying to describe to me how she felt on my own birthday or leading up to it. Now I think I understand. My body and my heart are shifting, welcoming the memories of these lives that so recently began. I feel expectant. I try to wrap my mind around the fact that last year I didn't know Cleo and Daphne yet. To understand that these little kids running around me weren't walking yet as they unknowingly waited for their little sisters to be born. I was their laying down mama. On my side on the carpeted floor in their bedroom as they crawled around me and over me. Unable to lift them up, miserable, itchy, exhausted. Last year when I already knew what to expect--when my waiting was tinged with knowing.

The year before I had no idea. I drank a Slurpee every day as I drove home in my Audi from my management job in Oakland to our house in a whole different weather zone. Pregnant and huge, sweating and itchy in the 100 degree heat of Martinez. This time two Mays ago I filled up an inflatable pool in our backyard and sat in icy water in a ruffled bikini, belly out to here. Baby A, my girl Lily, was taking up all the space--shoving her brother (who I thought was a sister) way up under my ribs on my right side. I would poke my finger beneath my bottom rib and try to shove him down so I could take a full breath. I felt my functional brain drip out of my ears as I waited for maternity leave to start, waited to finish up some projects so I could leave free and clear for six months. Instead my water broke eight weeks earlier than expected and two tiny strangers were launched into their lives as I became a mother.

These children take my breath away sometimes. I have never been so loved, so touched, so climbed upon. Looking at folders of digital pictures, trying for the first time in our four plus year relationship to make an album showing memories of our lives together, I see the evidence of days, weeks, months and years before me. Different body for me, several times over. People I now recognize so well looking out from miniature eyes set above tiny noses above now-familiar mouths. This is almost nothing like I thought it would be. It is deeper. Harder. More frustrating. I am raising four small people each of whom used to lie underneath my resting palms, under the roof of my rounded belly, under the fat and layers of muscle that were sliced through many years before to replace a dead liver with a live one, enclosed in their own sacs, floating in their own fluid, folded up paper cranes of secrets waiting to be revealed. Now they are here.